3 Responses

1. Night-Girl Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Not all arcs can have epic stories with world threatening events, and that applies doubly so to low level arcs.

   The story in this arc started out on a personal level, and ended on a larger scale. It centers around a low-rent apartment building that has been invaded by the Lost, and the mystery behind why they would do such a thing. Their motivation is a new idea that hasn’t been touched on in the official canon, and is a concept I haven’t seen used elsewhere in quite the same manner. There also is an element that appears to be part of a story that is interwoven with another of the author’s arcs, but I haven’t played them yet to find out.

   I had a hard time rating the design. There were only a couple of custom NPCs, and their clothing and concepts weren’t intended to be flashy. The choices made to deliver the story were nothing unusual, though there was appropriate colored text to help the reader. So, I can’t really say the design was AWESOME, but I can’t say it did any less than was necessary to deliver the story either.

   The gameplay was as good as I could expect. Lost and Tsoo are stock foes, and there weren’t really any special elements that increased the level of challenge. It wasn’t too hard or too easy, but nothing really stood out about it either. But can anything stand out? I have a hard time rating in this category as well– it’s going to be killer GMing, annoying due to overuse of things like escorts and large defeat alls, or somewhere between hard and okay. So if it doesn’t give me problems or seem pathetic, I’m giving it 5 stars.

   The detail was good. There were plenty of clues and enough dialogue. As I asked each question, it was answered shortly thereafter. There were a few bosses and NPCs that could have had descriptions beyond the stock descriptions, though.

   Overall a great arc, I applaud the attempt to make low level specific content (something I’m personally not really willing to sacrifice one of my three slots on), and I plan to do the rest of his when I have time.

   Posted on April 30th, 2009 at 10:45 pm

2. Vestigial Armor Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Dream Paper

   I usually steer clear of long story arcs with big maps and no custom critters, but I recently made an unexpected exception.

   Right out of the gate the contact himself pokes fun at it possibly being hard for a super-powered type to get excited about investigating apartments and warehouses for pieces of paper. However this seemingly innocent bit of wit would soon turn into a stark reality for me.

   The delivery style of the text was unique for sure, but not necessarily pleasing or efficient.

   First off this arc was easily the worst offender to date of the “$name” feature, and its abuse teetered from maddening to hilarious. I have never heard my toons name, sometimes 2 or 3 times within a few sentences or seconds, that much ever. I have been scarred so deeply I am buying a name change token when I finish this review. Don’t laugh I’m serious.Secondly the normal text delivery via the contact used a writing style I was a bit unfamiliar with, and I’m not sure I ever fully “got it” to be honest. Sometimes I felt like maybe English is not the Author’s first language, and if that’s the case I of course can’t fault them in the least. Obvious offenders weren’t that prevalent at all, just a couple of quickies like “there’s a lot of people where the Singer Lofts is all they have“, and some unorthodox uses of dashes Em dashes and sig dashes, but more obvious it seemed like wherever one would typically break a sentence with a comma or ellipsis, and then continue, a period is often used followed by a new sentence leading off with a conjunction. I’m only pointing it out because it was so unique. And frequent. At times. But I digress. And will again shortly I’m sure.

   Spelling was impeccable throughout.

   Now at mission start I knew I was in deep trouble because there was a section of the Intro dedicated to the detailed instructions on how clues in this arc would be utilizing a labeling system for clarity. Um… woah.

   Sure enough the clues dropped like rain in Seattle, but admittedly at first I liked this. They were well written and provided some insight into why I was rummaging through oh so familiar apartments and warehouses with oh so familiar standard critters. However this would change. It took me 3 or 4 times of rescuing captives and having them say things like “Let me tell you what’s going on…” and then running away without actually emoting and telling me what’s going on, before I realized their dialogue was transcending from the on screen speech balloons into the world of click on the tab to read a clue pop-up window. I’m not familiar with nor a fan of this particular use of clues for several reasons. First, I like how the character limit of the toon dialogue feature forces the author to be concise and on point. Secondly, if I missed something, I just scroll backwards a bit in my chat-box till I see the NPC Purple like I do in-game. Thirdly, it just makes great immersive sense to simply see the toon talk to me in real time after saving them.

   The description says the mission is solo friendly and it does not lie. I am a 20 something blaster with no enhancements slotted at all… and I handled all confrontations without ever eating dirt once… though I avoided many and chose wisely.Moving onto the specifics of the missions…

   Mission 1

   Fairly large map with a “kill em all” directive. Kill em all is okay, but on large maps yikes. I was scared this was foreshadowing of all “requirements to complete” to come, but to my pleasure that was not the case at all. In all future missions of the arc I was typically able to inviso by spawns and hit the directives at hand to get a mission complete.There was a hostage I thought was a bad guy for quite awhile (user error) and also encountered the first of only two (maybe three?) custom critters. Not too easy on the eyes and seemingly hastily slapped together and colored. As I am typically running missions in MA to see things I can’t see in regular DEV created content, I admittedly set the bar very high for custom critters, and in this arc I can see why the author relied almost exclusively on standard dev critters.

   Upon completing the mission I’m told in the same couple sentences not to worry about Grandma Yan (rescued captive) because she’s tough, and then that she could be in serious trouble.

   I don’t know whether to pop a xanax or grab a beer. I do both.

   Mission 2

   I blinked (well clicked) and now we’re talking about Tsoo. Unfortunately the only critter I’ve battled more than Lost in dev content is the Tsoo… but that’s on me not the author, so after a bit more of “You know what $name, I’m very mad at these bad guys $name. Do you think you can help me $name? Thanks $name!”, I suck it up and head in.There was a memorable scene of a LT writing on a clipboard, reading off a checklist, and some guys around him carrying crates seemingly following his directions. Finally something fresh. Very cool, very my vibe.

   The nav said Defeat Evacuation Leader… after 10 minutes of looking for this guy I finally discovered Evacuation Leader is actually Cloud Guardian in disguise.I beat him down accordingly and true to form he called me out by $name with every hit I gave him.

   The clue-work is still pretty decent at this point.

   Mission 3

   At this point the contact started saying “we” a lot, and sans a mouse in his pocket, all I could figure out is that he was working with the cops or something? Not sure that was made clear yet though, but maybe.

   Now I am thrust into a “Police Lab” A Police lab so technologically advanced I thought I was on the bridge of the Enterprise… if only the cops had put their budget into technologically advanced defenses as they did lab equipment, all these baddies wouldn’t be roaming around. In fact the only thing to break the illusion of the pristine Police Lab from the year 2112 was the random rusted out old oil can bombs that the Lost tended to hang out around.In this mission I did see a trippy AI bug thing… a rescued captive ran to a sliding door, opened it, turned around to face me, facing away from the door, and then ran in slow motion backwards out the door. How rad is that?

   The last two guys I rescued used the exact same dialogue text. Little things people… little things… grrrrr.

   Mission 4

   Holy crap now I’m chasing down trolls and charged with finding out about Superdine… I must have blinked again.

   A LT in here named Stonejaw didnt know or say my name – YEAH!!!!!!!!!!

   He just called me hero… but wait, what if I was a villain? Doesn’t matter… it was a welcomed salutation!

   In here I also encountered a bunch of random glowies with no purpose, I thought maybe they were used to control spawn placements or something, but I hadn’t seen anything up to this point to suggest the Author was working at that granular a level with MA objectives – so I dunno.

   Mission 5

   Damn it! The Lost know my name.

   The nav says to rescue Mr. Blaloch… but you actually have to kill him.

   This is where the clues finally kind of go off the deep end for me with overly detailed descriptions of printing press equipment. I dunno…

   –

   Overall there were just a lot of standard enemies on a lot of familiar maps and nogoal objectives or events beyond kill, rescue and glowie. I also didn’t catch any custom biosor descriptions on anyone or any thing.

   I do believe there was perhaps a well thought out story in here somewhere… but in the end the obvious elegance inhow the story was “written” could not break free of the lack luster concepts that the story was about… nor the run-of-the-mill actors, standard maps and objectives that surrounded it.

   I simply couldn’t get excited about a balding youth counselor who was thrust into the mission end messaging as the star of the Arc… and the one thing I WAS in fact excited about… The Dream Paper itself… didn’t really get fully realized or flushed out in any way at all.

   Meh… could’ve have just been the Xanax.

   Posted on May 14th, 2009 at 7:13 pm

3. @PW Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   I like the writing style and especially the dialog, and there’s some decent characterization. I like that you get to redeem the troll paperboy. I liked the structure and the amount of content in the final mission. The premise is neat and the idea of the dream paper is cool.

   However, I thought the plot itself was rather confusing, and I felt there were several plot holes and inconsistencies that I found distracting. The end of the story left me with a lot of questions unanswered, and I never did feel like I knew what exactly happened or what the ultimate goal of the paper mill was, even at the end. I think the story could benefit by having some of this background plot explained by the end, to give more of a sense of closure to the story arc.

   Posted on May 30th, 2009 at 7:32 pm